Bikely map

Woke up at around 8am to have a generous helping of (good) pancakes for breakfast with my friends (and hosts in Vancouver) Graydon and Frances. Graydon had prepared them the night before, and they were still quite tasty. We set out at around 9am, stopping at a water taxi dock so I could collect some Pacific Ocean water.

filling the bottle half-way

the bottle in my pannier (with the silver-colored screw-cap); it’s since been moved to the pannier on the other side.

Not having properly shaken down the loaded bike yet, the front panniers were jostling the front fender and making it rub against the tire. After visiting 2 shops (the nearest one, and the one the racks/panniers had been bought at) it was established that I had mounted the front racks incorrectly, so I fixed them (while Graydon and Frances waited patiently), and retweaked the fenders, and we set off (by this point it was around 11:15am).

Apart from the hills in Vancouver and Burnaby being larger/steeper than anything I’m particularly used to (particularly while hauling around 110lbs of bike+gear), nothing particularly noteworthy happened until we stopped around km 40 for a bathroom break, and I decided that my rear fender needed further adjustment.

During these adjustments, I discovered that the forwardmost of the stays holding the fender from the mounting point had separated from the fender. After wrestling with it for a short while to get it to stop rubbing in light of this, it worked… until I walked the bike off the curb it was on, the separated fender hardware rubbed against the wheel, caught it, swung forward, and acted as a brake.

Noting that the rear wheel was already quite thoroughly surrounded by the rear panniers and the (very waterproof) stuff sack holding my sleeping bag, I took the fender off and threw it out. At some point in this ordeal, the left braze-on mounting point for the rear rack had sheared off, but sliding it back, it seemed to hold in its place quite nicely due to a combination of gravity, shape, and tension in the rack itself, so I decided to leave it be until it either misbehaved, or we stopped for the night.

A bit further along, I decided to take a picture of some logs being pushed around Stave River by some tugboats (to document the fact that one of the prevailing uses of rivers in this province seems to be to float logs down them to the ocean, where they can be shipped to low-cost lumber mills in the developing world):

A little farther along, I also snapped what seemed like a nice shot of a foggy/cloudy mountain just up ahead, with the distinct contrast of considerably-less-attractive human settlement in front of it (the mountains just don’t look the same without those golden arches and traffic lights):

A little farther along, Graydon stopped and pulled off to the side of the road. After getting a few hundred metres past him, I looked back to see if everything was all right. Still being unused to the loading of the bike (and the rack being somewhat less securely mounted than it ought to have been), I felt the bike try to veer into traffic, so I veered it back to the shoulder and fell. I took the fall on my helmet, and the bike took the fall on the right panniers (which have since been patched with duct tape).

Upon righting the bike, I noticed that the right rear braze-on had also sheared off and landed in my gears. I’m still not sure if this was caused by, or helped cause the accident. Either way, I returned the mounts to roughly where they were supposed to be, and lashed them (and the rack they were attached to) to the frame with generous amounts of duct tape. After this, there were no remaining concerns about the mechanical condition of the bike (apart from the fact that the duct tape was to be replaced with proper clamp-on mounts at the next open bike shop, and a new helmet purchased while there), and up to Princeton no more emerged.

Finally, there was a bit of a bother of a climb near the end of the ride (with a descent that was almost certainly an even greater bother for Graydon and Frances returning the next day — well maybe not for Frances, given the relish with which she seems to approach difficult climbs), after which we got into some really pretty country where I snapped these:

and then managed to get in to Harrison Hot Springs mere seconds before 8pm (when Graydon had told the motel, at which he and Frances graciously put me up for the night, that we would be arriving). We then showered, ate, and caught the tail end of Batman on the TV before retiring for the night.